About That Time the Ceiling Caved in at a Michael Kors Runway Show

“I have a stiff neck,” Michael Kors told the audience at the Couture Council luncheon, after being introduced by Hilary Swank. “And I’m the least athletic person in the world. It’s from a bad massage,” he said upon accepting the artistry of fashion award at the Museum at F.I.T. benefit. Kors went on to offer his gratitude for being recognized, but—as many noted—his famous wit shined through.

“He has the gift of gab,” Iman told VF Daily during the fête at Lincoln Center. “I was meeting him for lunch one day, and he was doing a trunk show at Bergdorf Goodman, so I was watching,” she said. “I’ve never seen anybody talk to the customers like that. Each customer had special treatment, given full attention. It was a lesson to be learned.”

The designer is also famous for his warmth. “He’s very funny. He makes you feel comfortable,” Doutzen Kroes said, recalling her nervousness as a young model when first meeting with Kors. “He made me laugh so hard, and I don’t exactly know what it was, but we were talking about holidays and tanning and boys.”

Kors recently funded a fully paid F.I.T. scholarship for a deserving student, personally interviewing the finalists before settling on the lucky winner. Though the story of Kors’s rise to fashion-world prominence is well known, some industry insiders recalled that early in his career, the designer had a wide-ranging, if unintended, influence on the American apparel business.

“Michael is really the shot heard from Sarajevo that started the war,” Fern Mallis told VF Daily. “It was the ceiling collapse over his show that caused me to organize Fashion Week. Before the organized shows, if there were 50 shows, there were 50 locations. Michael’s was in a loft space in the 20s where he had a showroom, but he used an empty space in the building, and when the bass music went on, the ceiling plaster started to crumble on the runway. It landed on Suzy Menkes’s head, literally, and Carrie Donovan’s lap,” she said.

“I vividly remember the dust clearing and seeing Anna Wintour picking lumps of plaster out of Suzy Menkes’s hair,” said Simon Doonan, who wrote about the 1990 Kors show in his just-published book, The Asylum.

“Models on the runway brushed themselves off, the show went on, and then they all wrote the next day: ‘We live for fashion. We don’t want to die for it,’” Mallis added. “I just started at the C.F.D.A, and I said, ‘I think my job description just changed.’ And so Michael’s show caused, somewhat, all of this that’s going on now.”

“It was a historical moment,” said Doonan. “That was when the C.F.D.A. decided we’re all going to get killed unless we go out and find a functioning location.”

Kors described the experience when we caught up with him at the luncheon. “I was backstage, and I thought that I heard gunfire. I was like, ‘Is someone shooting someone in my audience? What’s going on?’” he told VF Daily. “Quite frankly, at first, all I cared about was that everyone was O.K. . . . The moral of the story: Fashion people are a tough flock. No one left. We turned the music really low, and we finished the show.”

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